The Fawlty Tow’r

Why does everyone who wants to force themselves into a prefabricated poetic form have to write haikus all the time? Screw haikus.

Why not try to funnel our poetic juices into another juice box, as it were? I choose to let the capricious sun of inspiration play a high C until I live to be 100 Plus. Tetra Pak. NO MORE JUICE BOXES, CHLOE.

Crap. I’ll start again.

One of the many books I’ve started but not finished is The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser.

One of the many reasons that I haven’t finished reading this book is the strange and extremely restricting meter in which the poem was written. It has to be one of the most convoluted ways to write a poem I’ve seen. Here’s my first and so far only shot at a single stanza of Spenserian metre. Now keep in mind that old Spenser wrote about a jillion stanzas using the exact same rhyme scheme. No wonder his epic poem doesn’t make any damn sense. Anyway, here’s my one stanza. It’s a true story of a 21st-century manchild and his quasi-legal downloading:

Tonight I sought to burn a DVD
Containing episodes of Fawlty Tow’rs.
But what should I upon exam’ning see?
The disc could hold but one and one-half hours!
I’d thought these discs possess’d quite greater pow’rs.
Three episodes at most a disc would fit!
Thus my enthusiasm for it sours.
Now on my hard drive those old shows will sit;
I watch the tiny screen and feel an utter twit.